at grass; and to see with what mirth they come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have music go before them."
"When cold bleak winds do roar,
And flowers can spring no more,
The fields that were seen
So pleasant and green
By winter all candied o'er:
Oh! how the town lass
Looks, with her white face
And lips so deadly pale.
But it is not so
With those that go
Through frost and snow,
With cheeks that glow,
To carry the milking pail."
On May-day was the festival of the milkmaids. I can remember, in 1845, seeing Jack in the Green and Maid Marian parading in the Strand.
Pepys, in his Diary, on the 1st May, 1667, enters—"To Westminster; on the way meeting many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them."
In a set of prints called "Tempest's Cryes of Lon'on," one is called "The Merry Milk-
